Airbus delivers the last “A380” – economy

Thursday should have been very different. Emirates airline, if it was the last time they had an Airbus A380 at the Hamburg plant, a celebration planned, a transfer flight to Dubai with invited guests and an appropriate reception at the home base. But in the end it will be a delivery like almost all of the other 124 that Emirates and Airbus have organized over the years: No guests, no celebration, the corona pandemic once again does not allow larger gatherings.

It’s just over then. For the very last time, Emirates is not the only one to receive one A380. With the handover, the production of the largest passenger aircraft in the world will finally be discontinued – 21 years after the program start, 16 years after the first flight and an absurdly short 14 years after the first use in scheduled service on the route from Singapore to Sydney.

Even in the boom years in air traffic after the global financial crisis of 2008/09, Airbus had not received any major orders for the aircraft, apart from Emirates. the A380 was soon compared to A350 and the Boeing 787 Especially when it comes to engines, they were technically out of date, the unit costs were too high, and the vast majority of airlines avoided the risk of having to fill between 400 and 500 seats on each flight, depending on the design. For a new version with better engines, the necessary orders – Airbus calculated around 300 – were far from coming together. The end of production was sealed well before the corona pandemic.

However, that doesn’t mean all of the current ones A380-Customers will also give up the operation of the giant jets so quickly. Many have retired their fleets because of the pandemic and do not want to bring them back after Corona. But there are at least a few exceptions – airlines that plan to continue flying the machines until well after 2030.

Since the program started, Airbus has 251 A380 built and now all delivered. Emirates is by far the largest customer with 123 orders. Singapore Airlines, the second largest operator, has bought 24 aircraft, Lufthansa is still the third most important with just 14 jets. The largest German airline has already decided that A380 no longer reactivate. Even before the pandemic, the group had, so to speak, traded seven of the aircraft at Airbus when it bought additional jets of the smaller one A350-Model ordered. This basically sealed the fate of the 500-seater, because small sub-fleets of less than ten aircraft are unprofitable: Spare parts and specially trained technicians, engineers and pilots would have to be kept for only a few machines.

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For Lufthansa, the end is A380 a pretty big strategy swing, which also CEO Carsten Spohr had to carry out internally. Spohr has long been an advocate of the idea that Lufthansa should operate particularly large long-haul jets alongside the A380 also the Boeing 747-8. Now the 747-8 become the largest aircraft in the group. At Lufthansa it has about 100 seats fewer than that A380. But the majority of the intercontinental fleet will in future be the A350 and the 787 make up that easily have around 200 seats less than that A380. The unit costs are the same or even lower thanks to the new engines and carbon fiber fuselage. And because the supply is scarce, the airline can also achieve even higher prices. A simple calculation. Air France came to the same conclusion. Your ten A380 are also retired.

There are a few exceptions, especially with airlines that operate congested hubs and long-haul routes with particularly high demand. British Airways, for example, wants their ten A380 continue to fly, on Wednesday morning two of the jets were in use – on the return flight from Los Angeles and Miami to London. Singapore Airlines also wants to continue flying twelve of the former 24 planes. From January onwards, they are expected to be deployed again to Frankfurt and on to New York. Qatar Airways has some of theirs A380 made ready for use again. Qantas is turning ten of its previous twelve A380 on the Kangaroo route via Singapore to London and across the Pacific to North America – the Elbe-Flugzeugwerke in Dresden have just installed new interiors in some of the jets. And of course Emirates: According to Flightradar24, there were 28 on Wednesday morning A380 the airline from Dubai in the air, most of them lined up like a string on their way to Europe, including machines to Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt. Emirates plans to reactivate 50 of its jets by the end of the year – provided the pandemic situation and demand allow it. Emirates airline chief Tim Clark believes that A380 will prove to be very valuable when air traffic booms again after the pandemic.